Day: December 2

Have you ever heard someone say, “You can be so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly good.”? The only problem with this cute little saying is that it goes completely against scripture. Colossians 3:1-3 says,

“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

More important than this silly saying is the mindset that goes with it, the mindset that assumes once you are saved that is it. End of the road. Is the innocent Christ who suffered bled and died that we might have that salvation not worthy of more than this? We owe him so much more than the first step. Can it really be possible to be too heavenly minded? Is it possible to be too spiritual? I hope your answer is no!

We know these verses are not telling us to lie around all day dreaming about what heaven must be like and never doing anything. That would clearly contradict many other passages in the Bible and these verses themselves are about action! It says to “seek those things which are above,”. Seek here means, “to seek a thing in order to find out by thinking, meditating, reasoning, to inquire into, aim at, strive after, require, to crave”; this is active! It also tells us, “Set your affection on things above,”. “Set your affection” is from the Greek word phroneo meaning, “to direct one’s mind to a thing, to seek, to strive for”. Obviously, God doesn’t want us to be useless in this world, he has sent each of us into this world to be lights and witnesses for him. His last words recorded in Matthew began with, “Go ye therefore…”!

God has given me many things to do for his sake in my own little realm as a daughter, an older sister, a member of the body of Christ, and a light in this world. He has also given you many things to do for his sake in your personal realm. As different as our lives may be, our purpose is the same: to live for the God who created and saved us. That begins with obedience to his Word, no matter how bizzare his commands may seem to our selfish, worldly little minds!

While reading in Exodus a few days ago, Mommy was pointing out to us the “if/then” pattern in certain places. Where God would tell the children of Israel, “If you do this, Then I will do this.” Since then I have been seeing more patterns that I hadn’t really thought about before, such as these verses I have been talking about in Colossians. The pattern in this one is “if A then B because C”. (Don’t worry algebra haters, this isn’t really math.) This pattern caused me to look at these verses differently. Do you see it?

“If ye then be risen with Christ,” Then “seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” Because “…ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

What purpose this passage gives us! If I am a Christian, if I have been raised with Christ from spiritual death: he has given me purpose! He wants me to seek the things above. What is above? Not just my heavenly home, Chirst himself is there. He wants me to seek him, to set my affection on him. Why do I need to do this? Because the old man, my fleshly self, is dead (Romans 6:6; Ephesians 4:22) and my life now belongs to the Lord. Knowing all of this, we ought to be constantly in the Word seeking out God’s will and yearning for his presence in our lives.

For as long as I can remember, Mommy has read the Bible to me (and my siblings as they came) every day. There have been some days here and there that we have missed but for the most part it has been daily. As each of us learned to read, we began splitting it up and reading a few verses each. She has always explained what we read according to what each of us could understand. I love to hear her explain a verse to the little ones, it brings back all those memories of her animated readings out of our children’s Bible she would read to Sara and me before bed, and all the stick figure illustrations she drew on the marker board to help us understand. Mommy has a special knack for finding the simplicity in a difficult passage and applying it to a child causing him or her to think, “Hey, God wrote this for me too!” As we have become Christians ourselves, she encouraged each of us to read the Bible daily on our own. All that to say, Mommy saw the importance of the role God’s Word plays in our lives and wanted to be sure we were always seeking.

Living as we are in a world permeated with wickedness and false doctrine, it is so easy to be distracted and thrown off course. God’s Word is the water to wash us from all those distractions and the light to keep our focus on the right things… the things above. We need to be consistent in our time in the Word so that our minds will be filled with things that honor God, only then will we be of any real earthly good.

– Ashley

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom… And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus…” Colossians 3:16a-17a